Social Media Campaign Policy Development

After creating the goals and objectives for your campaign, you should look at where your current strategy stands.

What social media platforms is your company currently posting on? What kind of material is being posted? How much or little engagement is there? When do you post? How often do you post?

It helps to create a spreadsheet to document your answers to the above questions. Use this spreadsheet and compare it against your strategy’s goals and objectives. Are there things you’re already doing well? What needs changing in order for your goals and objective need to be met?

Maybe your company is posting on the wrong social media channels, or posting the wrong type of content, or is currently not on another social network it could leverage for increased attention. Maybe your posts are going out at the wrong time.

It can be tempting to be on as many social media networks as possible. The downside of this is that you will wear yourself out, waste valuable time, and produce hurried, boring, bulk postings.

You need to do some research on your industry, your desired audience, and even your competitors. Where are your ideal audience members most active? When are they most likely to engage? What interests them and what messaging catches their attention?

There are multiple social networks that allow you to gain insights into these questions. Facebook, for example allows users to target specific audiences, see the interactions on their posts, the best and worst time for post engagement as well as demographics of those that interact with the posts.

Observing what your competitors are doing and how well they’re faring on social media can give you tips and tricks on what to try out and what to avoid when formulating and implementing your social media campaign.

You can be on every social media network and still not get the engagement and conversions you’re looking for because your content is bland, salesy, useless and impersonal.

You won’t know what to write without first identifying your ideal audience and social media networks. When coming up with content, you want to not only catch people’s attention, but you want to make your brand stand out as an authoritative and trustworthy source of information in your industry.

As you do this, it’s important to design your content to take advantage of each individual platform. Twitter, for instance, only allows for 140 characters and utilizes hashtags. Instagram, and Pinterest utilize images. Facebook utilizes text, images and videos. YouTube utilizes videos.

Your content needs to match the format of the platform, be interesting, and be useful. It should not come off as impersonal or condescending. Have your content make your brand appear as a person, not an organization.

• Once you research your audience, craft your content and schedule the posts on the appropriate social networks, you may be tempted to sit back and relax.
• If you put a lot of time, resources and energy into a social media strategy, you want to make sure the ROI is worth it. Otherwise you’ll remain stuck and stagnant in your efforts.
• Nobody wants to stay stuck and not grow.
• As with any aspects of internet marketing, things in social media change constantly.
• If you post a Facebook post at 2 pm one week and get a lot of engagement can turn into an ignored post the next week. Consumers also get bored seeing the same content all the time.
• Social media strategies require time and a plan.
• Just doing the occasional posting on a few social media channels will not result in a successful social strategy.
• A well-performing social strategy begins with goals and objectives. You need to see where your current strategy is, research the best social media channels and your target customers and create high-quality, useful and interesting content.